The Danish Environmental Protection Agency (DEPA) has initiated the study "Survey on basic knowledge about exposure and potential environmental and health risks for selected nanomaterials". The objective of the study is to provide an overview of the applications of the most commonly used or widespread nanomaterials and to identify areas most likely to have health or environmental problems associated with their use.

For the first time, bulk electronic structures have been opened to comparable scrutiny through a new variation of this standard called HARPES - Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy - whose development was led by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

An international team of researchers including scientists from The Australian National University have created a new, super-dense version of aluminium that could lead to efficient production of new super-hard nanomaterials at a relatively low cost.

An urgent challenge currently faced by researchers and the public alike is the ability to identify the next generation of sustainable, cost-effective, and energy efficient materials for our everyday use. While searching for new materials for electrical energy storage, a team of Drexel University materials scientists has discovered a new family of two-dimensional compounds proposed to have unique properties that may lead to groundbreaking advances in energy storage technology.

In microfluidic devices, small separated droplets flow in a stream of carrier liquid. Occasionally, selected droplets have to be merged to carry out a chemical reaction. This can be greatly facilitated with the use of electric field, through a process of electrocoalescence that has been used industrially in large scale applications. Researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences have found the laws governing the process and how to maximise the efficiency of merging.

This podcast is based on a review article in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, in which the scientists analyzed nearly 100 scientific articles on the effects of different types of nanoparticles on edible plants.

New medicines containing nanoparticles are proven to have clear curative value, but complications can sometimes arise. Researchers at the Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo have shown how nanoparticles can interfere with the transport of vital substances in cells.

A delicate balance of atomic forces can be exploited to make nanoparticle superclusters that are uniform in size - an attribute that's important for many nanotechnology applications but hard to accomplish, University of Michigan researchers say.

Researchers utilizing high-brightness x-rays at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science's Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory have demonstrated that synthetic, nearly defect-free diamond crystals can reflect more than 99% of hard x-ray photons backward in Bragg diffraction, with a remarkably small variation in the magnitude of reflectivity across the sample.

Graphene, considered the most exciting new material under study in the world of nanotechnology, just got even more interesting, according to a new study by a group of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.